404 THE VITAL FOBCE; 



a shipwrecked vessel, which was only conjectured, from the mer- 

 chandise it contained, to have come from Rhodes. 



On the foreground of the picture, youths and maidens formed a 

 closely crowded group. They were without clothing and well 

 formed, but at the same time did not exhibit the more noble and 

 graceful proportions admired in the statues of Praxiteles and Alca- 

 menes. Their robust limbs, showing the traces of laborious efforts, 

 and the purely terrestrial expression of their desires and sorrows, 

 seemed to take from them everything of a diviner character, and 

 to chain them exclusively to their earthly habitation. Their hair 

 was simply ornamented with leaves and field-flowers. Their arms 

 were outstretched towards each other, as if to indicate their desire of 

 union, but their troubled looks were turned towards a Genius who, 

 surrounded by bright light, hovered in the midst. A butterfly was 

 placed on his shoulder, and in his hand he held on high a lighted 

 torch. The contours of his form were soft and childlike, but his 

 glance was animated by celestial fire : he looked down as a master 

 upon the youths and maidens at his feet. Nothing else that was 

 characteristic could be discovered in the picture. Some persors 

 thought they could make out at its foot the letters and $, from 

 whence (as antiquaries were then no less bold in their conjectures 

 than they now are) they took occasion to infer, in a somewhat 

 forced manner, the name of Zenodorus ; thus attributing the work 

 to a painter of the same name as the artist who at a later period 

 cast the Colossus of Rhodes. 



The t( Rhodian Genius," however for such was the name given 

 to the picture did not want for commentators and interpreters 

 in Syracuse. Amateurs of the arts, and especially the younger 

 amongst them, on returning from a short visit to Corinth or Athens, 

 would have thought it equivalent to renouncing all pretensions to 

 connoisseurship if they had not been provided with some new ex- 

 planation. Some regarded the Genius as the personification of 

 Spiritual Love, forbidding the enjoyment of sensual pleasures; 

 others said it was the assertion of the empire of Reason over De- 

 sire : the wiser among the critics were silent, and presuming some 

 high, though yet undiscovered meaning, examined meanwhile, with 

 pleasure, the simple composition of the picture. 



